Alfred Hitchcock | Strangers on a Train / 1951

criss-cross

by Douglas Messerli

 

Czenzi Ormonde (screenplay, listed with Raymond Chandler, whose contributions were never used, based on an adaptation by Whitfield Cook of Patricia Highsmith's novel) Alfred Hitchcock (director) Strangers on a Train / 1951

 

Strangers on a Train has long been one of my favorite Hitchcock films, and with the news yesterday of the death of one of the film's stars, Farley Granger, I felt it was time I wrote about this work.

       I have seen this film dozens of times, and over the years I often mused about a silly game I might undertake, suggested by the phrase "criss-cross," which Bruno Antony (Robert Walker) uses to describe his plan for murder. Using the characters of this film, and applying a version of "six degrees of separation," I felt I could link all to people who I had met or known. For example, Robert Walker was married to Jennifer Jones until her affair with David O. Selznick. In 1971 Jones married art collector and philanthropist Norton Simon, with who my companion Howard met several times when the Norton Simon Museum was contemplating loaning some of their contemporary art to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Four separations.

     One of Farley Granger's earliest performances was in a play by Lillian Hellman, a friend of Djuna Barnes whom she helped support in Barnes' later years, by slipping envelopes of money under her door. I had met and interviewed Barnes in 1973, a few years before her death. Three separations.

      In his autobiography West Side Story librettist Arthur Laurents writes of his affair with Farley Granger while working on Hitchcock's film Rope. Tony in the film version of West Side Story was played by Richard Beymer, who attended my literary salons several times. Three separations.

      Another of Granger's lovers was composer-director Leonard Bernstein who personally encouraged my friend Charlie Wine to become a composer. Three separations again!

      The year after Strangers on a Train, actress Ruth Roman—who in this work plays Granger’s love interest, Anne Morton—played in Young Man with Ideas with Nina Foch, who taught acting to and befriended Howard's Aunt Lillian (who've I met several times). Three separations.

      My parents once reported that they, too, had met Nina Foch in a 1956 visit to Los Angeles, when she was at work on The Ten Commandments (although I have no idea, how and why this meeting took place). One of the stars of The Ten Commandments was Yul Brynner, whose Swiss aunt I once met. Three separations!

     In any event, this linking could go and on, although if one must ask, to what purpose? I suspect that my desire to interconnect this way has something to do with the structure of Strangers on the Train, where several different individuals cross paths, echoing and effecting one another. Indeed, in the case of the two major figures of the film, Guy Haines (Farley Granger) and Bruno Anthony, there is no separation. Once Anthony has recognized Haines on the train, intruding upon the famed tennis player, ("I beg your pardon, but aren't you Guy Haines?") the two become almost inseparable, dining together in Anthony's small train compartment, and conversing about all things from tennis to Anthony's strange philosophical views ("I have a theory that you should do everything before you die.").

      Although we know from the beginning that Haines is dating and hoping to marry the lovely senator's daughter, Anne Morton (Roman) as soon as he can divorce his wife, Hitchcock plays out this strange encounter as a kind of gay pickup, clearly toying with Granger's real-life bisexuality and his astonishingly good looks. Why else would Guy allow himself to be literally swept-up by the foppish, mama's boy Bruno (who in some scenes, looks nearly as handsome as Guy), who ultimately consumes him into the vertigo of his murderous intents. Before Guy can even display his discomfort, Bruno has outlined a plan whereby he will kill guy's wife if Guy will kill Bruno's father, the ingenious game he describes as "criss-cross."

     Guy's inadequate response—"I may be old-fashioned, but I thought murder was against the law."—reveals both his inability to comprehend this absurdity and suggests a darker possibility, that he is not at all adverse to the idea.

      In Highsmith's novel, Guy does go through with his part of the crime, and is imprisoned; in an earlier script by Raymond Chandler, a script which Hitchcock hated and tossed into the wastebasket while holding his nose, the film ended with Haines in a straight-jacket. So the doppelganger aspects of Haines and Anthony appear to be innately within the structure of the work, suggesting a kind of fused being with a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde personality.

      From the moment of Guy's and Bruno's meeting, there is no escaping each other, reiterated when Haines meets up with his wife, who refuses to grant him a divorce. Haines' fury as he calls back to Anne Morton in Washington, D.C., again points up a kind of receptivity to Bruno's mania: "I could kill her!"

     Bruno's acquisition of Guy's lighter along with his murder of Guy's selfish wife doom the tennis player to be entrapped within Bruno's perverted universe. Suddenly Bruno is everywhere, talking to Guy's friends at the tennis courts and even attending the senator's parties, where we truly experience Bruno's madness:

 

bruno (to the Senator): How do you do, sir? I'd like to talk with you sometime, sir, and tell you about my idea for harnessing the life force. It'll make atomic power look like the horse and buggy. I'm already developing my faculty for seeming millions of miles.

 

     By the end of the evening, he has almost unintentionally strangled one of the senator's guests, making his daughter Anne suspicious that there is a link between her lover and the interloper, which she expresses to Guy almost as in a jealous anger:

 

anne: How did you get him to do it?

guy: I get him to do it?

anne: Bruno Anthony. He killed Miriam, didn't he? It wasn't you, it was him

guy: Yes...

anne: Tell me the truth, how did you get Mr. Anthony to do it?

 

     The "doing" obviously is murder, but it suggests another "doing," the sexual act, (con)fusing the two. By film's end, Guy is forever wed to Bruno. What he says of the detective following him might also be said of his "double": "He sticks so close he's beginning to grow on me—like a fungus."

     When Guy refuses to participate in his half of the "bargain" with this devil, he precipitates a series of events wherein almost everyone in Guy's company are swallowed up into the secrecy and anguish facing him, including Anne (who, in visiting Bruno's mother, tries to convince her of her son's guilt) and the senator's other daughter, Barbara (Patricia Hitchcock), who up until now having taken the whole thing as a lark, suddenly realizes it was her face on which Bruno was fixated while nearly asphyxiating the woman at the party, a face, primarily because of her glasses, which resembles Guy's wife Miriam.

 

    It is as if Bruno is a kind of whirlwind force that sucks all those whose paths he crosses into his insanity. Accordingly, it is no accident that, in his attempt to implicate Guy in the murder of his wife by planting his lighter at the scene of the act, he and Guy are swept away in a battle upon a carousel, whirling out of control, where innocent children are hurt and possibly killed as well.

      Even as he lays dying, Bruno will not give up the evidence of the lighter or the truth, keeping like a fetish the links he still has to Guy Haines' identity. Only in death will he free his "other."

       For good or bad, this movie reveals, we are all intricately intertwined. Is it any wonder, in the final moment of the film when another stranger asks of the tennis player, "Aren't you Guy Haines?", he and Anne get up and move away. Perhaps, teases Hitchcock, it's better not to know your neighbors, issues this director will take up again in his 1954 movie, Rear Window.

      At the same time, to be accused of something you did not do merely through association brings up issues that were boiling over in the public sector when Strangers on a Train was made, namely what was later described as the "Red Scare," including the arrests of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in 1950, and, that same year a governmental connection of homosexuals and communists laid out in the government-published report, Employment of Homosexuals and Other Sex Perverts in Government—issues Hitchcock would explore in his 1956 film, The Wrong Man.

 

Los Angeles, March 30, 2011

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2011).

Will Domingos | Trevas (Marrow) / 2013

the heart of the matter

by Douglas Messerli

 

Will Domingos (screenplay and director) Trevas (Marrow) / 2013 [24 minutes]

 

I have now watched the Brazilian short film Marrow written and directed by Will Domingos 3 times in order to ascertain what this movie might truly be trying to say other than presenting some of the stunning beautiful scenery of the Southeastern Brazilian rain forest where two gay lovers (Lucas Nascimento and Andrêas Gatto) venture presumably to explore themselves and their relationship.

    Except for a brief introductory statement about how her father visited his farms by horse in the old days and the fact that she is highly nostalgic, words spoken by evidently the owner (Luciana Botelho) of the place in which they are staying, this almost a silent film, so words explain nothing to us.

     What we do observe is that the taller and heartier of two, which I think you can easily discern as the dominant figure in this relationship, seems to be fairly at home in this new world, readily agreeing with the statements of their landlady, and leading his other, darker and diminutive friend out each day for a wander down the small town’s lanes and avenues. He has the camera most of the time, and films randomly the landscape he encounters. The numerous passages of the film with the hand-held camera are, as several commentators—most notably a Letterboxd and IMDb commentator who goes under the moniker of CinemaSerf declared, is “annoying,” he describing the director’s “POV style” as “little better than a poorly focused video diary,” a viewpoint with which I agree.

     What is interesting, however, is that when the diminutive lover takes up the camera when the two swimming in a forest pond, he films only his lover, a human being, while the other seems more interested in structures and landscape.

      Generally, it is the dominant figure who leads their forays, with the other hanging back or moving ahead tentatively, while the other stops to photograph a window or a tree. When the dominant one goes headlong into the undergrowth, he passes through a kind of floral world of obvious beauty, while the smaller lover heads straight to a tree that seems to be losing its bark or which has been burned in a fire, almost hugging it as he focuses on its different sublimity.

      The dominant one explains how to bait a fisherman’s hook, while the other goes fishing. When the heartier friend dives into the pool, Camilo (evidently the name of diminutive one) waits on the side, eating an apple which he shares with his friend when he pops up from the water.

     The heartier of the two clearly cares for and looks after his friend, particularly one night when after several drinks outside a cantina, Camilo has grown drunk. Our forceful friend literally picks up his lover’s body, delivering it to the bed, as he lays down beside it, gently stroking him.

      Yet Camilo, several, times goes out in the countryside alone, one time witnessing a whole field of wild horses, at another point in the late-night jungle walk, spotting what looks to be a small puma. And it is he, who brings his lover to the last high outpost where far above, they look down upon the vast forest growth, a stunning waterfall cascading down the rocks near them.

     Perhaps, by the end of the voyage, Camilo has grown stronger, and takes chances far more than his seemingly more adventuresome other.

    One thing is made clear, however, during the entire trip, the two deeply love one another, taking every opportunity to kiss and make love. Even checking for ticks becomes an occasion for lovemaking. It appears that the larger of the two enjoys his role as guide and caretaker. But perhaps in the future, he will have to look deeper into himself and the world around him, he will need to cut into the marrow, the bone of the matter, as Camilo has, to find true beauty and meaning.

      Domingos’ film is lovely to look at when he focuses with his own camera and is an intensely subtle portrait of these two men—perhaps, at times, too subtle. But it’s certainly worth watching.

 

Los Angeles, August 10, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (August 2024).

Andrew Haigh | Weekend / 2011

 ready for love

by Douglas Messerli

 

Andrew Haigh (screenwriter and director) Weekend / 2011

 

Andrew Haigh's film Weekend begins quite inauspiciously with a family gathering in a home in what we later discover is Nottingham, England, where Karel Reisz's 1960 working class drama, Saturday Night, Sunday Morning was filmed. The major character in Haigh's movie, Russell (Tom Cullen) at first might seem little different from Arthur Seaton (Albert Finney) in that earlier film, a working-class bloke whose major activities include boozing and sex. Indeed, the first thing that happens when he appears at his friends' house—later than expected—is that Russell is handed a drink. Three males hover on the couch about the telly in much the way that straight Americans pray at the weekend alter of football and baseball games.

     In part, that is just the director's point. Russell is not very different from the married couple for whom he serves as their children's godfather. Despite that, we do sense something withheld, some reserve about him, and he soon makes an excuse about having to work early the next morning to slip out of their uneventful event.

     Instead of going home, Russell drops in at the local gay bar, where, after quickly cruising the place, he picks out a handsome youth, not so very different in appearance from himself, following him into the bathroom. The chase is not successful, and, at first, the viewer becomes convinced that Russell will go home alone or with someone else. But we later discover that, although the other young man, Glen (Chris New), had hoped to go home with someone else, the two have ended up together, having evidently pleasurable sex before settling down to the uncomfortable conversation that inevitably follows such chance encounters.

    Glen, however, is not like Russell's usual pick-ups. Before they can even begin to reveal anything to each other, he has thrust a recorder in front of Russell demanding he "talk about" the sex act they have just completed. It is a sort of "art project" he insists. "Say anything that comes into your head." The self-deprecating Russell, who works as a lifeguard, is more than taken aback, uncomfortable about talking on such a subject, something Glen argues is typical of gays, who, living in a heterosexual world, seldom feel comfortable about openly discussing their sexuality, even with one another. Taping such conversations, he argues, explores "a gap that opens up, when sex comes into play, between who someone really is and who he wants to be."

     Arguing that his small film is not, primarily, a gay film, but simply a love story, Haigh often moves his camera in documentary-style shots to give his love story a kind of naturalistic quality. Yet the questions Glen poses, which, in turn, engage Russell throughout the three days of their short affair, are distinctly gay issues and their discussions are directly related to 1960s art films.

    Is gay life really different from straight life? Russell argues, no, that it is simply a matter of two people coming together, and, as he increasingly grows to love Glen becomes transfixed by the idea of a more-or-less permanent relationship. Despite the ridiculously short time he knows Glen, the idea of this man being someone permanent in his life seems to grow daily as they meet privately for sex and drugs, and publicly with Glen's friends. At first Glen purposely lies to Russell, but finally admits that on Sunday is planning to leave for the US for two years to study art.

 

   Against Russell's gradual "coming out," so to speak, to the idea of a long-term gay relationship, Glen argues that gays are habitually trying to imitate straights, that marriage is just a way of denying what is different in their lives, their open and sometimes abandoned sexuality. For Glen all socialized behavior pushes the individual toward what he describes as a life in "concrete," a life living locked in set behavior. Even though we perceive that he has been terribly hurt by the failure of an earlier relationship, he insists that he didn't really care that his mate cheated, just that he just hated that he lied.

    Much of the film, to its credit, deals with the awkward little things—the dishware one has chosen, the clothes one puts on his back—that any "couple," must assimilate in order to discover someone else. But just as Russell perceives, for the first time perhaps in his life, that he is "ready" for love, so does Glen increasingly pull away, although we can see that in doing so he is putting himself in a corner that is worse than a concrete bunker. The problem with Glen's riffs is that most of them are just hot air, which one might easily juxtapose with Russell's repeated baths in hot water. The desired purity of the one is faced with the literal consumption and disappearance of the other.

     On the day of Glen's departure, Russell has promised to attend a birthday party for his god-daughter at the house where the film began. Observing his sad and almost haggard look, his married friend queries him about what is wrong. Russell steers the conversation away, suggesting it's just a gay thing, but his friend fires back that he never has discussed his sexual life. I was struck by the comment. Only a few days earlier, at lunch with straight friends, the woman, an art critic, commented that although several of her gay artist friends were very close to her and had been friends for years, few of them ever spoke of their sexual lives, as if somehow that was a territory no straight person could ever enter.

 

    I laughed, suggesting that Howard and I might be perfectly willing to discuss anything, everything, but that since we had been together now for nearly 42 years, it probably would not be very interesting. In the movie, Russell finally opens up, if just a little, to describe Glen and his feelings about him. As in the film Notting Hill, where Will Thacker (Hugh Grant) chases down Anna Scott (Julia Roberts) as she is about leave the country—a film actually referenced in Russell and his friend's conversation—the two rush off to the train station to see Glen.

     Like all lovers, Russell and Glen briefly argue, but in the end, kiss and make up in public—a first for the shy and less effusive Russell. Yet the film does not end happily, as Glen enters the train and is swept off, leaving Russell with a truly broken heart as he returns to his apartment—shot on the very spot where Albert Finney stood alone at the end of Saturday Night, Sunday Morning.

 

Los Angeles, October 9, 2011

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2011).

 

 

 

Vũ Ngọc Đãng | Hot boy nổi loạn và câu chuyện về thằng Cười, cô gái điếm và con vịt (Rebellious Hot Boy and the Story of Cười, the Prostitute and the Duck) aka Hotboy and Lost in Paradise / 2011, general release 2012

suffering for love

by Douglas Messerli

 

Vũ Ngọc Đãng and Lương Mạnh Hải (screenplay), Vũ Ngọc Đãng (director) Hot boy nổi loạn và câu chuyện về thằng Cười, cô gái điếm và con vịt (Rebellious Hot Boy and the Story of Cười, the Prostitute and the Duck) aka Hotboy and Lost in Paradise / 2011, general release 2012

 

A truly radical shift in how Vietnam cinema has previously portrayed gay individuals, Rebellious Hot Boy and the Story of Cười, the Prostitute and the Duck, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2011 and several other film festivals thereafter, being released under various “safer” and less fascinating names such as Rebellious Hot Boy, Hot Boy, and finally, Lost in Paradise, the latter of which has hardly any significance with regard to the film itself.

   The first title, in fact, reveals its bifurcated story, the one centering on serious issues of male prostitution; the peregrinations of an innocent country boy Khôi (Hồ Vĩnh Khoa) upon his arrival to Ho Chi Minh City after which he his robbed of everything, including his work papers; and a love affair between the manipulative prostitute Đông (Linh Sơn) and his lover Lam (Lương  Mạnh Hải) who are Khôi’s robbers; and later a relationship between Lam and Khôi—and a second, almost unrelated story about a female prostitute Hạnh (played by well-known Vietnam singer Phương Thanh) and a mentally handicapped man Cười (Hiếu Hiền), who hearing a woman using the metaphor to describe old eggs, “you can almost hear the cry of the duck” steals a egg to literally hatch a duckling in the rolls of his undershirt who becomes his pet, almost as if it were a beloved child. 

    Obviously, the gentle and strange story of love between an unknowing grown man and duck is meant to counterbalance the more violent aspects of the issues of prostitution, robbery, and later physical attacks that are portrayed in Vũ Ngọc Đãng’s film. But one wishes that he had been able to more deeply entwine the two, not just narratively, but in the metaphorical sense, both representing those without love finding and nurturing it from the most unlikely of sources. Yet one wonders whether doing so might literalize what is otherwise a tale filled with the unexpected and wonderment.

     Both narratives, however, end in violence and death. Although this film certainly does not represent the deeply ugly and destructive world of Wiktor Grodecki’s trilogy of Czech boy prostitution in the early 1990s, it does share some of the brutal abuse of natural believers such as Franz Bieberkop in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Fox and His Friends. But here it is the female prostitutes who are subjected to far more horrific treatment by their female pimp who nightly motorcycles by with her thug to collect her share of the woman’s receipts and to beat any of the girls who are not living up to expectation or to scare away the “crazies” such as Cười who is fascinated with Hanh. Basically, the male prostitutes of Ho Chi Minh City are left by themselves, working on their own hours, as we observe through Lam, and making a fairly good living. It’s what these men do to one another in their off hours that is so terrifying.

      Khôi, who we later discover has been kicked out of his home upon his parents discovering that he is gay, arrives in the former Saigon to see if he make a living. But no sooner has he purchased a newspaper to check out room rents than he is spotted by the handsome and physically fit Đông, who spots his pigeon immediately surmising his sexuality and situation, inviting him to share his apartment for far less that most other rentals. When Đông takes Khôi to see the place, however, the new renter encounters another person, Lam, whom Đông describes as his younger brother, living there, who is not at all happy, so it appears, with the possibility of another roommate.

      Actually, we quickly discover, Lam is Đông’s lover, and the two quickly confer, ending with Đông’s suggestion that Khôi take a much-needed shower. When he does so, they not only steal all of the contents of his suitcase including his papers and money, but Đông sends Lam into steal even the clothes the naif has been wearing, which leaves the new boy literally naked without anything that might permit him a dinner or even a job to pay for it, if he were to find enough clothing to even appear in public.     

     If Lam wonders if they might, at least allow him his official papers, Đông suggests it’s better they take them too, since it will force the boy to return to the provinces, without realizing that is almost impossibility for Khôi. In fleeing, the two leave as well unpaid rent, and when Khôi finally discovers some basic clothing, gathering up the stereo and other electronic material to sell for his

survival, the apartment owner spots him and threatens to send him to jail, not at all sympathetic for the poor boy’s situation.

     But even the significant new cash they’ve absconded with doesn’t seem to be enough, as he sends his friend off to get him a sandwich, having disappeared by the time he returns, leaving his lover in the lurch as he escapes the city. Lam almost seems relieved, however, to be free of the manipulative Đông, who we later discover through his conversations with a fellow male hustler, introduced him without Lam even knowing it was his lover’s profession, to prostitution by forcing him to have sex in a threesome with another “friend,” actually a customer. By the time we hear the full story, we recognize Đông as the true villain of the work, despite Lam’s continued and quite explicable—even to himself—love for him.

      In the meantime, Khôi finds menial work as a porter and Lam returns to the only profession he has learned, prostitution. And for long parts of this film, Vũ’s camera simply observes the two at their jobs as he introduces the subplot of Hạnh and Cười. Lam eventually begins to tell his story to a fellow hustler Long (La Quoc Hung), who eventually falling in love with Lam, asks if the two of them might have sex, Lam, having learned his lessons from Đông, refusing to mix business with pleasure.

      And Khôi, attempting to uproot vines covering the roof of the building in which he works, falls, badly hurting himself only to discover he is again moneyless and unemployed. Part one of this film ends, however, positively, with the birth of Cười’s duckling and the discovery by Lam of Khôi sleeping in an open stall, returning his suitcase full of clothes and a billfold to which he has added his own hard-earned money.

 

      Although there are obvious foretellings of what is to come—Hahn’s pimp, finding Cười once more sitting near the prostitute almost killing his beloved duck and Đông returning to demand that Lam join him once again, the first section ends quite lovely, with Lam taking in Khôi and the two beginning a loving relationship as they ritually wash each other’s hair and trim their toenails.

       The wheel inevitably turns once more in the second part, wherein Khôi is increasingly disturbed by his lover’s work as a prostitute, and his own attempts to work as a bookseller.  Đông, now in retaliation for Lam’s dismissal of him, dies everything he can to destroy their relationship. Frustrated by his actions, Lam stabs Đông in the foot. But because of his prostitution, Khôi ultimately leaves him ultimately in any event. Now desperate Lam begins to rob his sexual clients, one of his victims sending his gang out to beat him to death.

     When Hahn’s pimp once more comes across Cười and her girl together, the two finally having become friends, she again takes up the duck threatening to eat it, in reaction to which Hanh clubs both her and her thug to death.

       So things do not end well for the figures of this film, one of the gay men—in his role as both victim and victimizer perhaps the most interesting character of work—as in so many Hollywood films meeting up with death. Yet this is apparently the first film out of Viet Nam that does not treat gay men as effeminate stereotypes, and involves all of its “outsider” figures in a world much complex and full of contradictions than previously witnessed in Vietnamese cinema. If the characters seem, at moments, to be fairly unoriginal to audiences of Western films, I can only argue that the acting of both Linh Sơn and, in particular Lương Mạnh Hải is sophisticated enough to keep our attention through the narrative rough spots. And we are certainly saddened when Lam and Khôi are unable to make a go of their relationship, given all they have both suffered for love.

 

Los Angeles, September 25, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2022).